As recipients of a number of loans over the years, I can only speak for ourselves and for others whom we know that have also had loans.

Firstly, Amazon will not pursue you for payment of the loan yet or anytime soon; they don’t work like that. However, as I’m sure you have already noted, any sales that you make, the money goes to the lending pot first.

Secondly (and having discussed difficulties with people in the past), Amazon will not refinance the loan, they will simply wait until you can pay it off, over however long that may take, though interest does still accrue.

Thirdly, you will not be able to close your account with an open debit balance.

Speaking to people in the past, they have tried (with some success) to split their sales between various platforms, including Amazon, until the loan is paid off, when they can resume normal selling.

From our experience they will re-finance loans, but only if you are still eligble, I believe that the re-finance is treated as a totally new loan without considering the loan you are paying off, so if your account has nose-dived the chances are that you are no longer eligble, and hence why they are refusing to help. As there are issues on companies house / HMRC etc then they would also take this into account.

Normally when they re-finance they so also only agree if there is an amount of “top-up”, I am not sure they will just give you a new loan for the exact value of what your existing onee is. If you only have 4 months left, you should also be aware that the interest rate increased by 2% a few months ago as well, so you would be hit with another load of interest at a higher rate.

We have effectively taken top-up loans on several occassions, normally we get offered these through our dashboard once we have made 2 payments on the loan. The system is a good one, but does really rely heavily on your sales remaining stable. I do think they offer far too much, and if people ever took the maximum on offer can see how it would be impossible to re-pay. At times they have offered us 40% on our annual turnover which would equate to monthly payments of 60k+ per month which we would be complete nuts to comit to that.

Hi Nosey

I have had success with them in the past .
You have to contact them and explain the situation .
They gave me 3 month without paying .

If it were me, I would re-finance by taking out a third party cash loan over a longer term, and pay off the amazon loan with it (I presume it’s possible to pay early, or make additional payments?)

Yes you would probably need a personal guarantee, possibly even a personal loan if there are HMRC issues. It really depends on if the business is worth saving, and whether you are sure that would make the difference.

UPDATE:
thank you to all those who have taken time to try to help, advice etc.
An ongoing update. When trying to file the ‘accounts’ to CH this morning, the ‘accountant’ somehow had us as being OWED 244k from Trade customers…we have not had trade customers for 5 years! They also had assets changing from 3k (which was serious wrong anyway!) to 139k (also clearly very wrong).
Previous loans paid off 3 years ago, still showing as owed!
This gives you an idea of what we are up against.
Amazon had said on Firday, they were going to call us at 10am this morning…now 11:43 and nothing!
So 2 steps forward and 1 step backward! but we are moving forward…
We still await HRMC replying.
So we are still here for now.x

UPDATE:
Amazon have agreed to refinance the loan over 12 months! YAY…
That gives us the space and time needed to try and work out and resolve the accounts problem. Just now waiting on HMRC to contact us to resolve(see how badly they intend to slap us!) our accounts.
We may have to contact the Police/trading standards regarding the accountant as the accounts are that bad, it’s now hard to believe that is anything other than a cowboy ‘pretending’ to be an accountant!
Hoodwinked comes to mind! but hey…we are still here(for now).
A HUGE thank you to you all and i’m humbled by how many of you have offered help and advice over the past week.

Hi Maja

thank you for your reply.
Yes, I did email them using this address but is there a way I could speak to a manager over the phone?

regards

andre